What is the Origin of the Inequality among Mankind; and whether such
Inequality is authorized by the Law of Nature?
A DISCOURSE UPON THE ORIGIN AND THE FOUNDATION OF THE INEQUALITY AMONG
MANKIND
'Tis of man I am to speak; and the very question, in answer to which I
am to speak of him, sufficiently informs me that I am going to speak
to men; for to those alone, who are not afraid of honouring truth, it
belongs to propose discussions of this kind. I shall therefore
maintain with confidence the cause of mankind before the sages, who
invite me to stand up in its defence; and I shall think myself happy,
if I can but behave in a manner not unworthy of my subject and of my
judges.
I conceive two species of inequality among men; one which I call
natural, or physical inequality, because it is established by nature,
and consists in the difference of age, health, bodily strength, and
the qualities of the mind, or of the soul; the other which may be
termed moral, or political inequality, because it depends on a kind of
convention, and is established, or at least authorized, by the common
consent of mankind. This species of inequality consists in the
different privileges, which some men enjoy, to the prejudice of
others, such as that of being richer, more honoured, more powerful,
and even that of exacting obedience from them.
It were absurd to ask, what is the cause of natural inequality, seeing
the bare definition of natural inequality answers the question: it
would be more absurd still to enquire, if there might not be some
essential connection between the two species of inequality, as it
would be asking, in other words, if those who command are necessarily
better men than those who obey; and if strength of body or of mind,
wisdom or virtue are always to be found in individuals, in the same
proportion with power, or riches: a question, fit perhaps to be
discussed by slaves in the hearing of their masters, but unbecoming
free and reasonable beings in quest of truth.
What therefore is precisely the subject of this discourse? It is to
point out, in the progress of things, that moment, when, right taking
place of violence, nature became subject to law; to display that chain
of surprising events, in consequence of which the strong submitted to
serve the weak, and the people to purchase imaginary ease, at the
expense of real happiness.
The philosophers, who have examined the foundations of society, have,
every one of them, perceived the necessity of tracing it back to a
state of nature, but not one of them has ever arrived there. Some of
them have not scrupled to attribute to man in that state the ideas of
justice and injustice, without troubling their heads to prove, that he
really must have had such ideas, or even that such ideas were useful
to him: others have spoken of the natural right of every man to keep
what belongs to him, without letting us know what they meant by the
word belong; others, without further ceremony ascribing to the
strongest an authority over the weakest, have immediately struck out
government, without thinking of the time requisite for men to form any
notion of the things signified by the words authority and government.
All of them, in fine, constantly harping on wants, avidity,
oppression, desires and pride, have transferred to the state of nature
ideas picked up in the bosom of society. In speaking of savages they
described citizens. Nay, few of our own writers seem to have so much
as doubted, that a state of nature did once actually exist; though it
plainly appears by Sacred History, that even the first man,
immediately furnished as he was by God himself with both instructions
and precepts, never lived in that state, and that, if we give to the
books of Moses that credit which every Christian philosopher ought to
give to them, we must deny that, even before the deluge, such a state
ever existed among men, unless they fell into it by some extraordinary
event: a paradox very difficult to maintain, and altogether impossible
to prove.
Let us begin therefore, by laying aside facts, for they do not affect
the question. The researches, in which we may engage on this occasion,
are not to be taken for historical truths, but merely as hypothetical
and conditional reasonings, fitter to illustrate the nature of things,
than to show their true origin, like those systems, which our
naturalists daily make of the formation of the world. Religion
commands us to believe, that men, having been drawn by God himself out
of a state of nature, are unequal, because it is his pleasure they
should be so; but religion does not forbid us to draw conjectures
solely from the nature of man, considered in itself, and from that of
the beings which surround him, concerning the fate of mankind, had
they been left to themselves. This is then the question I am to
answer, the question I propose to examine in the present discourse. As
mankind in general have an interest in my subject, I shall endeavour
to use a language suitable to all nations; or rather, forgetting the
circumstances of time and place in order to think of nothing but the
men I speak to, I shall suppose myself in the Lyceum of Athens,
repeating the lessons of my masters before the Platos and the
Xenocrates of that famous seat of philosophy as my judges, and in
presence of the whole human species as my audience.
O man, whatever country you may belong to, whatever your opinions may
be, attend to my words; you shall hear your history such as I think I
have read it, not in books composed by those like you, for they are
liars, but in the book of nature which never lies. All that I shall
repeat after her, must be true, without any intermixture of falsehood,
but where I may happen, without intending it, to introduce my own
conceits. The times I am going to speak of are very remote. How much
you are changed from what you once were! 'Tis in a manner the life of
your species that I am going to write, from the qualities which you
have received, and which your education and your habits could deprave,
but could not destroy. There is, I am sensible, an age at which every
individual of you would choose to stop; and you will look out for the
age at which, had you your wish, your species had stopped. Uneasy at
your present condition for reasons which threaten your unhappy
posterity with still greater uneasiness, you will perhaps wish it were
in your power to go back; and this sentiment ought to be considered,
as the panegyric of your first parents, the condemnation of your
contemporaries, and a source of terror to all those who may have the
misfortune of succeeding you.